Object vision and visual awareness

Abstract

Conscious experience involves perceiving, attending, remembering, and recognizing. Recent neuroscientific research has made significant contributions to our understanding of the mechanisms that mediate such capacities. Physiological and neuropsychological investigations have provided increasingly detailed descriptions of the location and functional properties of the brain structures involved in conscious perception, in attentive behavior and working memory, and in the recognition of objects. Such studies suggest that awareness of a visual stimulus probably reflects the interconnectivity and the type of cells involved in the representation of this stimulus, rather than the activity of specific circumscribed visual areas or processing streams.